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Divorce and Deadlines

RAOUL FELDER likes to say that marriage is the first step to divorce, which might betray an agenda on his part since separations are his bread and butter. During his own 46-year marriage, however, the divorce lawyer says, he and his wife have never had an argument.

In his witty memoir, “Reflections in a Mirror: Of Love, Loss, Death and Divorce” (Barricade Books, $24.95), Mr. Felder channels Neil Simon, recalling a childhood in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, (and visiting his grandparents in Brighton Beach). Then he segues into a career representing clients ranging from the former Miss America Bess Myerson’s lover (though not against her) to Rudolph W. Giuliani (about whom he reveals very little).

Mr. Felder’s mirror is convex; he appears approachable but even larger than life. And while many of his insights and anecdotes of celebrity misbehavior might sound familiar to regular readers of Page Six in The New York Post, he strings them together into a chatty and irreverent narrative.

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In a more serious but no less readable memoir, Stephen B. Shepard, the founding dean of the City University of New York’s Graduate School of Journalism and a former editor of Business Week, couples an account of his upbringing in the Bronx and education at City College with keen-eyed observations about a profession that has been undergoing a warp-speed transformation.

His “Deadlines and Disruption: My Turbulent Path From Print to Digital” (McGraw Hill, $28) traces the impact of that revolution on his role as an editor and an academic dean. Not only was technology upending the business of journalism, but it was also giving readers a new voice. “News was now becoming a conversation,” he writes, “a process rather than a product.”

Where the news business will wind up is anyone’s guess, and Mr. Shepard does not pretend to know all the answers. But after asking the right questions, he arrives at cautious optimism, envisioning the development of some future business model in which journalism will be profitable to the people who produce it and useful to those who consume it.

Jews have long been known as the “People of the Book,” but three volumes? And just about New York? Well, why not?

In the 17th century, the first Jewish congregation in New York was called Shearith Israel — Remnant of Israel — which was “an apt name for the handful living in a colonial town far from European centers of Jewish life,” Deborah Dash Moore, a history professor at the University of Michigan, writes in her foreword to “City of Promises: A History of the Jews of New York” (NYU Press, $99).

This surprisingly accessible narrative by four historians covers 1654 to the present, exploring the early communal entities that accommodated later mass migration, as well as the 20th-century challenges posed by Zionism and by ethnic and racial changes in the city.

For dessert, each volume has a “visual essay” in which Diana L. Linden, an art historian, illuminates cultural icons (including Benny Leonard’s boxing gloves and the bodies of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg) emblematic of the promises that were redeemed, that were unfulfilled and that still beckon immigrants.